Birth of the Republic

In 1765 John Dickinson, of Philadelpiha, thought that American independence from Great Britain would bring "a multitude of Commonwealths, Crimes, and Calamities, Ceturies of Mutual Jealousies, Hatred, Wars of Devastation." Twenty-four years later he saw the United States adopt its present Constitution, which he had helped to draft. Here are the events of that remarkable quarter-century which tranformed thirteen quarrelsome colonies into a nation. This account of the Revolutionary period shows how the challenge of British taxation started Americans on a search for constitutional principles to protect their freedom. The author demnstrates that these principles were not abstract doctrines of political theory but beliefs growing out of the immediate needs and experience of the colonists, held with passionate conviction, and incorporated, finally, into the constitutions of the new American states and of the United States.